The Old Magic of Christmas Read online

  The White Bees Are Swarming

  In “The Snow Queen,” when fat white snowflakes are swirling outside the window, the old grandmother tells little Kay and Gerda, “Those are the white bees swarming there!” Later, Kay spots the “queen bee” herself as she alights on the rim of an empty flowerpot as “a lady dressed in the finest white crape . . . composed of millions of starlike particles.” Although there was no Frau Berchta afoot in Andersen’s Denmark, the writer had traveled extensively through Europe, including the Alpine hinterlands where Berchta’s larger servants still come to collect tribute for their Queen Bee, as they call her. Though the “queen” herself is nowhere in sight, her servants present themselves dutifully at the farmer’s gate in grotesquely carved wooden masks. They remind the farmer that it is Frau Berchta who blankets the fields in snow so the soil can rest and yield generous crops next year. The farmer had better make an offering to these worker bees if he wants them to come back and dance in the fields at the close of winter and bless the furrows.

  On Berchtl Nights, the goddess’s Austrian servants take to the streets and create a din by ringing cowbells and playing tuneless music on their fiddles. These activities were not always confined to Advent Thursdays or to Austria. A fortnight before St. Andrew’s Day (November 30) 1572, one Hans Buchmann claimed that he had been transported by supernatural agency from the forest near Rothenburg, Germany, to Milan, Italy. When he was first set upon, he thought he was under attack by a swarm of bees, but the buzzing then resolved itself into a terrifying scraping of bows on fiddle strings. We don’t know what really happened to Hans—just before his disappearance he had borrowed some money without asking, so he had plenty of reason to fabricate the tale—but it is interesting that he should have thought to mention how the buzzing of bees had preceded his being lifted up and carried over the treetops. After that, he had to make his own way back to Rothenburg, finally arriving on Candlemas (February 2).

  In the Alps of the same century, a visit from the Salige Fräuleins (“Blessed Young Ladies”), who came at night to sample food offerings left on the table, was announced by a softer bee-like music than the one Hans Buchmann heard. These Blessed Ones, as they are also called, would eventually make themselves over as the Christ Child’s retinue and replace the humming with the tinkling of a tiny clapper bell. Still, wherever Berchta is remembered under her own name, we can expect to hear buzzing strings or at least some allusion to bees.

  A Bird’s-Eye View

  Also running amok was Berchta’s more northerly incarnation, Frau Holle, who used to take charge of all infants who died before they could be baptized. The stubbled fields over which the broomstick-mounted Frau Holle and her adopted children flew at Christmastime would be especially bountiful at the next harvest, but if you looked up at the flight of spirits as they passed overhead, you would be struck blind. Frau Holle eventually lost her sacred season in the north, but, thanks to the Brothers Grimm, she is remembered in fairy tale.

  Frau Holle is the stereotypical German Hausfrau. The snow is the goose down that swirls into the sky when she shakes out her voluminous featherbed; the fog is the steam wafting up from the pots on her stove; and the thunder is the turning of her flax reel. Frau Holle was always looking for good help. To apply for the maid’s position in her house, you first had to pass through water, either the pool in which she bathed to make herself young again, or an ordinary well.

  In the Grimms’ fairy tale “Frau Holle,” an industrious though apparently clumsy girl drops her spindle down a well. Naturally, she goes in after it, emerging in a wonderful land full of flowers and sunshine. She wanders aimlessly, helping out a loaf of bread about to burn and a drooping apple tree along the way. Finally arriving at a cottage, she is greeted by a long-toothed old woman who introduces herself as Frau Holle and offers her a place in the household. The girl stays on to cook, clean, and help shake out the featherbeds, until she grows homesick. Frau Holle releases her without complaint, showering her with gold coins as she steps out the door.

  Later, the girl’s lazy stepsister dives down into the same well to see what she can get out of the old woman. She ignores both the imperiled loaf of bread and the apple tree, and when she gets to the cottage, she does little more than trail her fingers over the dusty furniture and swat half-heartedly at the bedclothes. When she announces that she is quitting, she gets a bucket of pitch dumped over her head.

  While the German Frau Holle has been known to let herself go, her lack of youthful bloom is nothing compared to the horror that is Perchta. The Alpine Perchta is the image of Frau Holle as it might appear in that devilish, distorting mirror with which Andersen opens “The Snow Queen.” The name Perchta dates back to the fourteenth century, while the first written reference to a horrible witch who presided over the winter festivities comes from Salz-

  burg in the tenth. Who knows how long she might have been around before that? Of course, she may not always have gone by the name of Perchta; Jacob Grimm offers us the possibility that her name may have come from Old High German giperahta naht, or “shining night,” that is, Epiphany (January 6), the night on which the Star shone down on Bethlehem. The fact that the old witch still has her own Perchtentag, or “Perchta’s Day,” on January 6, and that she is celebrated through all the Twelve Days of Christmas with the Perchtenlauf, or “Running of Perchta’s servants,” is a major accomplishment.

  Yes, Perchta does have a pretty side, which is embodied by the “Pretty Perchten,” who array themselves in flowery, cone-shaped headdresses, but most of her votaries appear as hairy, horned monsters, their huge mouths carved into grimaces. These “Evil Perchten” are not just ugly, but rowdy too. One of their jobs is to climb up on the village rooftops and drop snowballs down the chimneys.

  How has Perchta managed to last so long? Certainly not by being pretty or nice. One of the secrets of her longevity may be her willingness to poke her long nose into other people’s business, as we will see her doing on St. Barbara’s and St. Lucy’s Eve in chapter 9. Since the fifteenth century at least, Perchta has been portrayed with an inhumanly long nose. Sometimes described as “iron-nosed,” her Austrian nickname, Schnabelpercht, “Beak Perchta,” is more apt. Perchta was also supposed to have one splayed foot, ostensibly from pressing the treadle of her spinning wheel, but more likely to have been a goose or swan’s foot. These avian vestiges, along with the white feathers that Frau Holle caused to fall from the sky, suggest that Perchta was used to assuming the shape of a bird, an ancient habit of Germanic goddesses like Frigga and Freya.

  House Calls

  Another strategy for holding on to power is to keep a close eye on one’s subjects. Accordingly, the irrepressible old hag used to visit homes personally on the Eve of Epiphany (January 5). If she liked what she found, the German Berchta might leave a gift of her own sky-spun yarn as a token of her approval. If this Yuletide goddess didn’t like what she saw, then you had better beware. When she stepped over the threshold, she might be carrying a bundle of twigs, straw, or brushwood in one of her withered claws. Was she thinking of doing a little extra sweeping with that bundle of twigs? Or had she brought kindling for the fire? She might also be holding a brick, so perhaps she’d come to fix that chink in the garden wall? Unfortunately, it was none of the above.

  Once she’d run her talon over the tops of the cupboards and counted the full spools of thread, the old biddy would want to know what you had made for supper and whether or not you remembered to put a little aside for her. She had better not smell any meat through that long beak of a nose, because the Eve of Epiphany meant a brief re-institution of the penitential fast that preceded Christmas. On this night, as the initials of the Three Kings were being chalked upon the lintel, the only permissible foods were fish and starch. Oatmeal with a little smoked herring on the side was one way to go, as was a thin pancake made of only flour and milk. Dumplings were a tastier solution. In the Thuringian forest of central Germany, Frau Holl
e was credited with the original potato dumpling recipe from which all others descend, while in Braunschweig to the north, she insisted only that no beans be eaten during the Twelve Days of Christmas.

  But what if you forgot and went out for beer and sausages just before the old lady arrived? Or if you cooked the right dishes but forgot to leave an extra portion warming on the stove? The consequences would not be quite the same as if you had neglected to put out cookies for Santa, for Frau Berchta would be really, horribly upset. First, she would slit open your belly with the knife she kept hidden in her skirts. Then she would reach in and pull out all that forbidden food, replacing it with the bundle of kindling—or that brick—before she sewed you up again using farm implements instead of surgical instruments. She wouldn’t do any of this right away but would wait until you were sleeping.

  In the Icelandic Laxdaela Saga, An the Black, smith to Olaf Hoskuldsson, undergoes the same procedure not once but twice. In chapter 48, An dreams that a hag is standing over him with a meat cleaver and a wooden trough. Without a word, she cuts him open, scoops out his entrails, and stuffs him full of twigs. Was it something he ate? Scrooge might have said so, for did he not try to dismiss Marley’s ghost as “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato”? When An relates his experience at breakfast the next morning, the other men tease him, but his hostess interprets the vision as a warning.

  Sure enough, in the next chapter, An and his traveling companions are engaged in a prolonged sword fight with the men of Laugar. By the time the fight is over, An’s entrails are spilling out for real. He is presumed dead and laid out accordingly. But that night, he sits up suddenly in the candlelight, startling those who are keeping watch over his body. An assures them he was never really dead, only dreaming. The same strange woman had returned, extracted the load of kindling, and put his own bits back again. The smith makes a full recovery and is known as An Twig-belly forever after, or at least until chapter 55, when he gets his head split open while avenging the death of Kjartan Olafsson. Some wounds a witch just can’t fix.

  So if a knife-wielding Berchta appears to you on the heels of some overindulgence, know that she is not really stealing your gastrointestinal tract; she’s just keeping it safe until you learn to make more intelligent choices.

  The Lady of the Castle

  In Switzerland, a “White Lady” who appears to be a glamorized version of the Spinnstubenfrau, and who was in fact known as “Bertha,” was attached to a tenth-century castle tower on the shores of Lake Geneva. A White Lady is a tutelary spirit who takes it upon herself to guard treasures, announce impending deaths in a noble family, and even comfort the children. Each Christmas Eve, this Bertha materialized out of the fog dressed in a glowing white dress and carrying a scepter that at one time must have been a distaff, for she was especially interested in whether or not the girls had finished their spinning. In addition to inspecting the nearby households, she scattered handfuls of grain as she went. Like all queens, she never traveled alone but was trailed by an assortment of dwarves, kobolds, and other child-sized spirits as she set off from the foundations of her tower.

  According to some accounts, this Bertha was the ghost of a historical queen, possibly a Swabian princess who married King Rudolph in the year 922. Others claim she was the mother or grandmother of Charlemagne. Whoever she might have been, the Swiss Bertha eventually outgrew her original identity. In time, she became even too big for the White Lady’s boots, for her distaff and Yuletide appearance—not to mention that bird’s foot she kept hidden inside the sparkling hem of her gown—all marked her as yet another incarnation of the queen of the gods.

  All in all, this Bertha’s haunting was of a very different sort from that carried out by another famous queen and Christmas ghost, Anne Boleyn, who used to appear in a white dress among the trees of the park outside her childhood home of Rochford Hall during the Twelve Days of Christmas. Because she had no special association with the later residents of Rochford Hall, except to terrify them, Anne cannot be counted as a proper White Lady. Besides, White Ladyhood requires a certain stick-to-itiveness that Anne’s ghost lacked: during the same season in which she haunted Rochford in Essex, she was known to pop over, headless, to Hever Castle in Kent.

  Falling midway between the ethereal Bertha and the earthbound Anne Boleyn is the most famous White Lady of all. For centuries, her ghost clung to a castle perched above the Vltava River, which also runs through Prague. While alive, she documented her existence so well that it is still possible to get to know her. She was born to the powerful House of Rožmberk (German Rosenberg) in southern Bohemia sometime in 1429. We don’t know the exact date of her birth, but because she was christened “Perchta,” it is tempting to think she might have been born or at least baptized during the Twelve Days of Christmas.

  At the age of twenty, Perchta was given in wedlock to the recently widowed Jan of Lichtenstein. The union was a disappointment for them both. Much if not all of the conflict within the Lichtenstein home was precipitated by Perchta’s father’s nonpayment of the dowry. Far from helping matters was the presence of Jan’s first wife’s mother and sister, who treated the new wife like Cinderella. We know of Perchta’s profound unhappiness from the many letters she wrote begging her father and brothers to come and rescue her or at least to send cash. In one of her portraits, Perchta is wearing a fine white dress but, tellingly, no jewels; she pawned the last of them in 1463 in a last-ditch effort to win her husband’s affection. In 1465, she returned with her daughter to her old home at Český Krumlov Castle, her husband having forced her to leave their one surviving son behind. She never lived with Jan again, remaining with her brother’s family until her death.

  Compared to Anne Boleyn, Perchta slipped almost soundlessly into the afterlife, dying of the plague in 1476. Her mortal life became the palimpsest over which the story of her new career as White Lady was written, for her spirit stayed on at the old castle. Her ghost was described as a solemn lady in white holding a bunch of keys. She wore white gloves when she had good news to impart, black gloves when disaster loomed. Those who tried to speak to her as she glided along the passageways were rebuffed when she disappeared into the wall in a cloud of vapor. She was also known to make surprise inspections of the nursery, to the horror of the nursemaids. Perchta has kept a low profile since the death of the last Rožmberk, Petr Vok, in 1611, though she has been credited with tearing the Nazi flag from the castle’s tower during World War II.

  Within the castle at Český Krumlov is a Baroque, long-after-the-fact painting of Perchta in a white gown and loose blue sash, her hair in golden ringlets. She holds a slender rod with which she seems to be pointing to the sweep of arcane symbols inscribed at her feet. Whoever can decipher them, the legend says, will know where within the castle a great treasure is hidden. If you’re going to try to decode Perchta’s message yourself, I suggest you invoke the help of that other, older Perchta before her sacred season is over.

  But be careful not to spend too much time on the puzzle; if you are meant to solve it, you will. Don’t sit too long in the cold as Andersen’s Kay did on the frozen lake in the middle of the Snow Queen’s palace, arranging and rearranging the jagged shards of ice his mistress had given him. It was not until Gerda arrived and her tears dissolved the broken bit of mirror lodged in his heart that Kay was able, effortlessly, to spell out the word “Eternity.” Washed out by his own tears, the tiny, silvered glass fragment in his eye, too, fell tinkling upon the ice.

  In “The Snow Queen,” the last we hear of the titular anti-heroine is that she is going on holiday to whiten the vineyards and citron groves of the warm countries, but we know it is only a matter of time before she circles back to her blue-lit throne room north of the Arctic Circle. Old Perchta, too, will continue to make her rounds, carrying both winter and Christmas to all the lands through which she passes, for another key to long life is pride in one’s wor
k. Perchta’s overriding mission has always been to serve as a grisly embodiment of winter, which can first be greeted with merry noise, then driven out again with as much, if not more, rejoicing. “They say she ruled for a hundred years: a hundred years of winter,” the Black Dwarf Nikabrik says admiringly of the White Witch in Prince Caspian. “There’s power, if you like. There’s something practical.”

  Craft: Distaff Tree

  The word distaff means “fiber stick.” Thus, the Old Norse dísir and Old English idises, tutelary spirits who presided over the birth of a child, determined the length, thickness, and overall quality of the thread that was to be that child’s lifespan, just like the fairies in “Sleeping Beauty.”

  The most primitive kind of distaff is, indeed, a stick. It should be long enough that the spinner can hold it comfortably between her knees and have the cloud of unspun fibers at eye level, but not so long that she cannot tuck it under her arm if she wants to spin while walking. Any sapling or straight branch with an upward sweep of twigs on the end will do, such as ash, sycamore, or sassafras. No, you don’t need a spindle; this distaff is for decorative purposes only.

  In turn-of-the-last-century Pennsylvania, the poor city dweller’s alternative to a fresh-cut Christmas tree was a branch of sassafras set upright in a stand, its branches covered in cotton batting. You don’t have to use sassafras for this craft, but your branch or sapling should have the same upward sweep of twigs. Strip your branch of all leaves and any loose bits of bark. Wind each twig tightly around with a strip of cotton batting or unrolled cotton ball so it looks like the tree is covered in snow. Wrap the trunk or central branch as well. When your tree is all wrapped, adorn it with a short string of tiny lights. For a wintry look, I prefer clear or blue lights on a white wire. Set your creation in the window and call it a distaff, Christmas tree, or queen’s scepter as you like. Because the cotton has not been spun, you will have to undress the twigs before the Spinnstubenfrau comes to inspect your work at Epiphany, but if you like, you can replace the lights on the bare twigs and keep them up until Candlemas.